Taking Responsibility for CX

Here is a short follow-up to the previous article about leadership taking responsible for Customer Experience. This little experience just last week before the Hari Raya Holidays goes to illustrate how leadership can deliver superior CX.

As a coffee aficionado, I regularly source and order fresh beans from local and regional roasters. One local roaster I have been ordering from is Common Man Coffee based out of Singapore. They do have a cafe here in KL though. I like my coffee fresh and heat does bad things to good coffee beans so whenever I place an order, I would rather drive over and pick up the beans instead of having them shipped to me. Of course, there’s no one at home to receive the order which makes the convenience of shipping moot to begin with.

Common Man Coffee (link) has always consistently delivered good customer experience, including customizing their online storefront to add a “Pickup in Store” option so that I can order and only drive over when the order is ready. In preparation for the holidays, I made an order on Sunday and planned to pickup the order by Tuesday. Unfortunately, they made a small mistake in their holiday rush. I’m sure plenty of orders needed to be rushed out by Monday to meet holiday deadlines and mistakes regularly happen in times like this. Even Amazon is not immune but that is a story for another time.

My beans were shipped to my horror. Luckily DHL was willing to leave the package in my mailbox. I wrote in and rechecked my order. I did select “Pick-up” and no shipping fee was charged. Amazingly, the person responsible for my order, Pablo, replied by email, taking both responsibility and admitting to making the mistake. This is key from a customer’s perspective. In most cases, the customer isn’t looking for much. Where there is errors or problems, customers are looking for them to get fixed, otherwise the customer is looking for someone to take responsibility and move on. In my case, the order didn’t sit too long in my mailbox and the order was quite well packed so I just wanted to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. To receive a personal email from the person responsible says a lot about the customer experience focus of an organization. We all know how frustrating it is to get a response back and it’s from the dreaded anonymous “Customer Service” department saying that they will look into the problem.

So, I’m sure leadership at Common Man Coffee takes customer experience seriously because if they didn’t, everyone else would. A while back, I wrote that failure is unavoidable but recovery is mandatory (article here ). This story both sums up how leadership and service recovery can both deliver the “Wow” customer experience you are looking for.